With the growth of mobile Internet services, data of wireless communication network increase sharply, thereby boosting the demand for broadband. In order to alleviate the congestion of mobile cellular network, part of the data from the mobile cellular network may be shunt with other available access technology as a complement to the mobile cellular network.
Conventionally, the main complementary network technology for data shunting may include: Wireless Fidelity (WiFi), femtocell, Integrated Mobile Broadcast (iMB), etc., in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). These technologies may be applied to Long Term Evolution network (LTE), Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and other cellular networks.
In LTE and UMTS cellular networks, when a user equipment (UE) transmits data, a base station for the user equipment may configure a corresponding Radio Bearer (RB) for the data needing to be transmitted according to a specified quality of service (QoS) required by the data, where different RBs may be provided with different wireless parameters to ensure the specified quality of service for the carried data. The user equipment adopts the RB configured by the base station to transmit the data, and hence the data transmission may be reliable and the resources may be utilized effectively.
In realizing the data shunting as described above, the inventors found that: if a shunting network is adopted by the system to shunt data, the shunted data may not be transmitted in the shunting network based on the specified quality of service due to a lack of a corresponding mechanism, i.e., the specified quality of service in the shunting network may not be guaranteed, hence the shunting network may fail to meet the requirement of the specified quality of service, and the data transmission may be less reliable.